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Craigslist Fights Back, Sues SC Atty General
FredMastro writes "Craigslist has now stepped past just asking for an apology. The Wall Street Journal and CNet report that Craigslist is fighting back. 'Craigslist said it has sued South Carolina Attorney General Henry McMaster, in the latest escalation of a battle over adult-oriented ads on the company's site. Jim Buckmaster, Craigslist's chief executive, said in a blog post that the company filed its suit in federal court in South Carolina. ...'" Unfortunately, the WSJ's piece requires a subscription, but reader Locke2005 adds a link to coverage in the San Jose Business Journal.
1) Copy and paste the url http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124283370260739663.html
2) Copy and paste into google, resulting in a link like this
Click link and read page.
Not pasting full text of article though, so you're gonna have to do it yourself.
Is it sad that I am more likely to recognize you and your posts by your sig than your name or UID?
Read this...
http://blog.craigslist.org/2009/05/an-apology-is-in-order/
No comprende? Let me type that a little slower for you...
Government officials, including the president, get sued all the time. Because they are being sued pursuant to their job, their employer defends them. Hell, I was just a lowly Officer with the IRS back in the day and I managed to get myself sued once or twice. The government has some really good lawyers and I was glad of it.
Sometimes, things get even more indisidious. Back in the day (20+ years ago) every local district office of the IRS had a director. There were 66 of them spread around the country and they were the public face of the IRS. Ours was a good guy, totally in the "firm but fair" mode, who even had a sense of humor. He used to donate his time (very occasionally) to charity to sit in a dunk tank and let the public try to drop him into the water.
So what was his reward for trying to be open, transparent, and just plain *human* to the public? Not only did he get sued pretty much every week, lots of anti-tax protestors would go to various county courthouses in the area and file "common law liens." These bogus documents were a bunch of rambling nonsense that basically says "The IRS is illegal so the local director should be held personally liable for all the damage they cause." Said "damage" was calculated in various ways, ranging from just the amount the aggrieved citizen-idiot owed all the way up to some approximation of the entire amount of money collected by the IRS in that city that year, typically billions.
The clerks at the county courthouses eventually learned to recognize this crap and refuse to accept bogus documents for filing but that put them on thin ice; they are supposed to let anything be filed and let the courts decide if a filing is fraudulent. Sometimes they just held the filings until the lawyers could have a look. Most time, the filings just went through.
Our guy was a good person, making a good salary, filing all required financial disclosure reports that showed he never defaulted on a loan or was late with bills. But at the courthouse, there were filings showing that he was a multi-billion dollar deadbeat. The poor guy had the worst credit in the world. Getting a loan to buy a house or car or just getting a credit card was an exercise in frustration for him.
So the answer to your question is "Lots of government lawyers spend their time going to court, time that could have been better spent doing work in the public interest. The few people filing frivoulous actions waste lots of your tax money. That's what happens."
No Nevada city that has legalized prostitution has any significant amount of street walkers or off-the-books prostitutes. I grew up there and know the normal type of people that would have those connections (drug dealers, ex-cons, etc.) and have never heard of anything of the like. Maybe it would be different in a city large enough to matter (it's illegal in both Washoe and Clark counties), but I don't think there's any reason to believe that it would be a huge social problem like it is now. And I think you will find that prices with illegal prostitutes are pretty comparable with legal ones. The risk associated with performing an illegal activity costs just as much or more as "regulatory overhead."
Legalized prostitution in Nevada is better for johns (safety, both from dealing with criminals and possible VD), better for the prostitutes (better working conditions, access to legal solutions in case of abuse, generally better pay, legally legitimate), and society (they get to regulate where brothels are located, brothels can't advertize so there's not tacky ads on all the taxis, cops have more time to deal with real crimes). The only people who don't benefit are pimps. I really don't understand why this is still an issue in our country. Legalize it already.